An answer was not required; this was a rebuke, not a question.
‘I’ll see you in court, J.J. In the morning.’
She knocked on the door of the cell, it opened as if by touch to release her. Such magic did not extend to me; I remained imprisoned. I scanned the fax. The message was flavoured more with concern than blame, and somehow managed to avoid all mention of my predicament, although the addendum at the bottom of the page—Father Sends His Love—was a fiction, I was certain.
I cast the page aside. My own problems paled in comparison with those of Wish. Dinner arrived: a meat pie and can of Coke, with a coffee and cream bun afterwards to differentiate it from breakfast. I couldn’t sleep. I tossed all night amid the stink of disinfectant and stale meat pie. Images of Wish at the edge of a filthy moat, her skin raw and bleeding, her hands frantically signing for help, filled my mind.
My court appearance was brief, a thirty-second lecture from the magistrate. Word of my zoo visit must have spread, the small crowd of reporters in the courtroom had swollen, and aged. Several of the new faces had a distinctly predatory look. Linda seemed increasingly at home, but to me the notion of fighting for justice in the courts, or even in the media, was clearly impossible. Wish was suffering, now—a solution was required, immediately. Desperate to make a quick escape, I accepted Linda’s offer to bring her car to the back. She directed me to the exit, suggesting that I didn’t show my face until she had fetched her car from the carpark. I wasn’t about to wait. I stuck my head through the back door, a kind of service entrance. No reporters were in sight. I walked out into the road and hailed the first vacant cab.
7
The Auslan shape for ‘worry’ is a misnomer: literally too-much-thinking. A value judgement, surely. Worry is often a necessity, worry alone can provide the sheer energy that is needed to search for possibilities, solutions, ways out. This type of worry requires another sign—not-enough-thinking, perhaps. Or tenacious thinking, resolute thinking.
No one was home at my parents’ house. I pulled on my wetsuit, crossed the esplanade and waded out into the surf in a state of controlled worry, methodical worry.
Or is ‘methodical’ another misnomer? Sign uses the shape of ‘street’, a straight road ahead.
My worrying was less methodical than bent, an exploration of every fork in the road, every single back alley and detour. Exhaustive thinking, perhaps. Thinking that was whole, complete, all-embracing.
A plan of action had been forming in my mind overnight, to succeed would require absolute attention to detail. As the swell lifted and lowered me those details began to accumulate. And yet time was of the essence—I was unsure how long Wish could survive in her prison. After an hour or so I emerged, sluiced away the salt in the warmer cold water of the shower at the bottom of the beach steps, towelled my hair and my wetsuit, and climbed up to the empty house.
I scribbled a brief note on the back of my mother’s fax, explaining, bluntly and without apology, the facts as I saw them, adding Love to Father as an ironic postscript. Then I pulled the Yellow Pages from the phone cupboard, and opened to Car Rental.
8
Rosie’s school is in the foothills, in the heart of the eastern suburbs Volvo belt: an expensive single-sex school set in leafy grounds. As talented academically as she is socially, her fees are paid by scholarship.
I arrived at lunchtime. The din of children at play filled my ears as I parked in the side lane, a continuous joyous screaming.
I thought of Wish, huddled in her pit, and those carefree voices seemed unbearably poignant.
Rosie spotted me immediately—I’m an unmistakable figure. Normally diffident about acknowledging me in front of friends, she waved and approached with clear pleasure. Was it the sight of the hire-car parked behind me—a gleaming, four-wheel-drive people-mover, more minibus than car? She had always refused to permit me to collect her from school in the old Fiat. There might be fatter dads in the Volvo Belt, but there were no more shameful cars.
‘New car, Dad?’
Her tone surprised me as much as her smile, happy, pleased to see me.
‘I’m going on a trip.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Not sure yet.’
‘I can’t come,’ she said, in case I was about to ask. ‘Mum doesn’t want me to see you at present. I hope you’re not disappointed.’
Her tone—solicitous, even gentle—continued to surprise me. Perhaps I had been wrong about the attraction of the car. She had acted as a precocious teenager for years, but now, twelve years old, on true teen-brink, she seemed to have suddenly passed through adolescence into a more sensitive, adult state.
‘Did she say why?’
She hesitated, as if deciding whether to protect me from the truth. ‘She said you were unstable at present. Behaving…erratically.’
To prove she understood the adult-jargon, she whirled her index finger about her temple. Her expression was amused, as if this was hardly news. I had always been crazy. Lovably crazy.
‘I just wanted to say goodbye,’ I said. ‘I might not be seeing you for a while.’
‘Don’t worry, Dad. Mum will change her mind.’
‘It’s not her. It’s me. Whatever happens—whatever you read about me—I wanted you to know I love you.’
She looked behind her, embarrassed. I was starting to get sentimental, testing the limits of her new-found maturity. But she turned back to me again, smiled with radiance, and crossed her arms over her chest, the hug of love.
‘Me too, Dad.’
‘Thank you.’
She eyed me up and down. ‘You put on weight?’
With finger and thumb I prised open a small gap between the buttons of my shirt, revealing my black wetsuit.
‘I’m going swimming.’
‘Crazy—true!’ she signed, giggling.
A teacher on yard-duty—a young woman, thirtyish, stylishly dressed—moved our way.
‘Excuse me, Mr James?’
‘Yes.’
‘I must ask you to leave the vicinity of the school. Your wife rang this morning—about the injunction. The Headmistress has advised us to watch out for you.’
‘I’m harmless,’ I said. ‘I just came to say goodbye.’
She moved in front of my daughter, a human shield. ‘Then please leave,’ she said. ‘Or I will be forced to call the police.’
I looked back as I climbed into the car. Rosie was walking backwards into the school, shepherded by the teacher but still watching me. She lifted her Wish Hand as I drove away—Good Luck.
9
I left the car at the rear of the zoo, beneath the trees outside the service gate, and followed the high-walled perimeter on foot to the Children’s Zoo entrance. I had a feeling that the staff might be watching for me at the main entrance, might even have been issued with my photograph. I donned sunglasses and attached myself informally to a mother and two children in the ticket queue, as if belonging to the same loose family group. Paranoia, or intuition? Paranoia is another modification of the shape for ‘think’, the Good Hand replaced by the Bad:
Not so much bad thinking as safe thinking, I’d argue; I couldn’t afford to take risks. And I was beginning to trust my powers of intuition, they had often proved right.
As my adopted wife passed through the turnstile and out of earshot, I murmured to the cashier: ‘Jill didn’t pay for me?’
‘No, sir—she didn’t.’
I slid a handful of coins beneath the glass partition, pushed through the turnstile and immediately headed out of the Children’s Zoo, abandoning my new family.
Another fatherless family clump was staring into the squash court that contained the chimp colony; I joined them. No keepers were in sight; as the mother and her children moved away I stepped quickly across the STAFF ONLY barrier, and onto the viewing platform above the holding pit. I couldn’t see Wish at first, but she had spotted me; she materialised in the back of the enclosure as if from thin air, poured herse
lf effortlessly through the scaffolding, and in a moment was standing at the lip of the moat, signing frantically.
‘Lonely,’ she shaped, repeatedly, her own familiar invention.
‘I know. I feel too.’
I took a last quick look around, then stripped to my wetsuit, stepped over the low guard-rail and slid, as noiselessly as I could, into the filthy moat. My head went under, momentarily—but this was my element, after all. I surfaced, spitting, and breast-stroked through a broth of food wrappers, decayed vegetation and cigarette butts. Emerging on the far side was not so easy. The rim was green-slimed and slippery, the smooth submerged wall of the moat offered no foothold. I was struggling, chest-deep when two powerful arms seized me, and hauled me from the mire.
‘Hide,’ I signed, urgently, one Flat Hand covering, concealing, the other.
She turned; I followed her through the tangle of scaffolding to the back of the pit. A small shelter had been constructed there: a roof of bark placed between two horizontal logs. I squeezed beneath, she followed me, obscuring me from outside view. The water that had found its way between wetsuit and skin had not yet warmed to body temperature, I was shivering with cold. Wish clasped me tightly to her body, nuzzling me gently, her hands too busy touching and holding me to sign. I was cramped and painfully uncomfortable, and covered in slime—but I couldn’t risk leaving the shelter till nightfall. I ran my fingers over her skin, the raw abrasions and deep scratches. Stubble pricked my fingertips here and there, new-growth, tough as steel wool.
Remembering this, writing these words, my hands still fly involuntarily to hide my face. I feel no shame for my feelings for Wish, but I feel enormous shame for the stupidity, the sheer comic idiocy, of that attempted zoo-break. Where did I think I was going to take her? My plans were still vague, half-formed—the fruits of panic. First, to smuggle her through the service gate after dark. Then to head south to Cape Jervis—an hour’s drive—and take the ferry to Kangaroo Island. After that the details were murky—but at least I would have bought time. The ferry crossing—an hour across Backstairs Passage—would prove difficult; she could never pass as human. My plan was to hide her on the floor of the car, cover her with blankets, and cross my fingers.
Squashed into her makeshift shelter, I tried to think it through. Tiddy’s idea of releasing Wish into the wilds of Africa, among her own species, had infuriated me—but as a last resort I believed that she could, at least, survive in the wild. A herbivore, she would never starve. Kangaroo Island contained no predator but man: the nearest crocodiles were on the other side of the continent. Snakes abounded, but here Wish had a built-in preservation-sense. I had shown her a flash-card picture of a snake during our first days together; she had instantly ascended the nearest tree, panicking, unable to distinguish between the representation of the thing and the thing itself.
Ferries crossed hourly from Cape Jervis; this I had checked. There had been no time to arrange accommodation—my plan was to camp out till I could find some abandoned farm, or fisherman’s shack, on the thickly wooded western end of the island. That the foliage of Kangaroo Island was eucalypt not sclerophyll, and therefore probably poisonous to a gorilla, didn’t cross my mind; I reasoned only that the forest would offer sanctuary if and when our safe-house was found. On this point I was not optimistic, but to snatch a few weeks with Wish—even a few precious days—would allow me to prepare her for the ordeals which must inevitably follow.
She still had an important lesson to learn, perhaps the most important: that the stupidity and cruelty of her cousin species, Homo sapiens, was limitless.
The zoo closed at five; the ringing of distant bells carried to us, followed by a vague, distorted announcement on the PA system. I waited another half an hour then crept from the hide, stretching cramped legs. The coast seemed clear; I followed Wish through the scaffolding, dragging a log to the edge of the moat. If she refused to swim perhaps I could tow her across. At the water’s edge, I looked up. Tiddy, the Curator of Primates, was standing on the viewing platform, staring down into the pit, astonished, a copy of Sign for Beginners in his hand.
10
Linda refused to represent me; I had ignored her advice once too often. Not even my growing fame could tempt her back. Bail was rescinded; I was remanded in custody until the trial. My protests went unheeded, a testy magistrate advised me merely that a lawyer appointed by the court would ‘probably’ visit me the following day.
I spent another restless, agitated night in the same deodorised cell.
The morning paper arrived, neatly folded, on the breakfast tray between the Coke and the stale meat pie. The presence of a newspaper, the first I had been given in the watchhouse, should have been a clue. I ignored it for some time, preoccupied. Even when I flipped the paper open, seeking distraction, and scanned the front page, the sense failed to register at first.
LOVE APE DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT.
A formulaic headline of the kind the mind learns to skip past, without noticing. But the horror of the accompanying photograph would not be denied.
Wish, clearly dead, hung from one of the ropes in her zoo enclosure. Definition was poor, but some sort of noose seemed to have been knotted around her neck. The tyre was still pendant below her. Her limbs were skewed, twisted in a death rictus, the expression on her face—tormented.
These are the bare facts, best left to speak for themselves. Neither words nor signs can offer more.
Crilly visited me later that morning, alone, placing another copy of the morning paper in my hands as if it were a gift.
‘Your girlfriend couldn’t live without you, big feller.’
He sat on the bed and watched me closely, a student of human nature, jaded, but still willing to learn—or wanting at least to tease his palate with some last thrill. Miffed that I had already seen the headlines, he rose to leave after a few minutes.
‘Yes,’ I called after him, ‘I loved her.’ Not so much to gratify him, as to tell someone. Anyone.
Loved. Love. Past tense in Sign is less economical, but as always, more expressive: the verb, preceded by the sign for past, for finished, already, done.
Past-love, finished-love. Perhaps there is something in that backwards jerk of the hand, in the physical act itself that is therapeutic, a closing off and casting out. Or does it merely prevent the thinking of certain thoughts, the feeling of certain emotions? The tenses of Auslan have an inbuilt optimism, structured into the actual movement and direction of the hands. Tomorrow lies forwards, a road ahead. Yesterday is behind us, backwards, over the shoulder. English is no different. We put the past ‘behind’ us, we move ‘ahead’ into the future. But do we? Struggling with grief, it seemed to me that Sign was suddenly, hopelessly inadequate. The structure of my language permitted one way of thinking, my heart demanded another. Sitting in my cell I tried to imagine a sign-language in which the movement of the hands was reversed, in which the direction of the past was straight ahead, the future behind. Because surely we are all walking backwards, blindly, into the future. We know not where we go—we cannot see it. It is the past that is always with us; we must face it forever.
I was sent, pending trial, to a low-security prison on the river: less prison, at first glance, than summer camp. The days passed with infinite slowness; to describe their routines and repetitions would be pointless. There is simply nothing important to tell. My mother visited in my first week, but not my father. The visit was not a success. She still avoided all mention of my alleged crime; we signed for half an hour or so, not so much beating about the bush as beating empty air.
‘I bring anything next week?
‘Wetsuit. Flippers.’
The prison contained a large pool; I was permitted a daily dip. Grieving, I kept largely to myself; my fellow prisoners seemed to respect my grief, and kept their distance. From time to time I was teased—the nickname Tarzan, inevitably, might have been tattooed on my forehead—but perhaps that teasing was more an attempt to communicate with someone who r
esisted communication, who wished to remain incommunicado. Perhaps it was also a form of probing, teasing sharpened by curiosity. These, after all, were men who had pushed further into forbidden regions than most. Only the paedophiles had passed completely beyond the pale: the lowest of the low, ‘rockspiders’ in the patois, a term that is even more contemptuous in Sign, making the flesh crawl, literally, the spider of one hand creeping up the opposite arm.
What was I compared to these? A harmless eccentric. I was content to play the role of clown, a role whose lines I had learnt by rote, as a fat boy at school. A strange thing: the ribbing of my fellow inmates was far less ferocious than the teasing of my schoolmates.
At times I felt a perverse jealousy for the rockspiders who were carried off to the sick bay after falling in the communal showers, or scalding themselves with boiling water from the tea urn. Theirs, at least, was perceived as a real crime, worthy of hatred. They were taken seriously. More importantly, their victims were taken seriously, deemed worthy of protection, and respect. One or two old hands seemed to find a certain larrikin ambition in my crime, worthy of at least some respect—like a difficult circus trick. That’s the bloke who fucked the monkey. But, finally, I was a joke, and therefore Wish also was a joke, consigned, again, to the inhuman world, and perhaps even to the inanimate. A thing, a sex object. A crime object, like a gun, or a payroll.
A surprise visitor came to see me several weeks after that terrible photograph appeared. At first I refused to accept the visit—she had come to apportion blame, I suspected. Almost immediately I changed my mind; I needed someone to talk with, to vent my own anger on.
And even perhaps someone to share my grief with.
We sat on the lawn outside the Visitors’ Centre, away from the various family clumps. I saw immediately that she had not come to blame me—she reserved the largest share of blame for herself, the remainder for Clive.
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